Mountain View, California-based Adobe Systems Inc has generated a deal of excitement with the launch of its first venture into hardware, the Adobe Type 1 Co-processor, a font-rendering chip designed to eliminate character generation as a bottleneck in printer and display performance: the Co-processor is claimed to be capable of rendering text at up to 2,000 characters per second, or 25 times faster than today’s fastest RISC-based printer controllers, and can be incorporated into PostScript printers and display controllers, so that printers can run at their rated engine speed, regardless of the number of fonts or point sizes in a document; the part is sampling now, but there is no word on price or volume date.
